4 reasons why WISPs should become Tanaza Distributors

by Marketing Team | Jul 13, 2017 | Classic Hotspot, Industry news

4 reasons why WISPs should become Tanaza Distributors

Why WISPs should join the Tanaza Distributor Program

In this post, we focus on the advantages for WISPs to leverage Tanaza in order to grow their business effectively.

If you are a WISP looking for new ideas to grow your business, you should consider becoming a Tanaza distributor. In general, WISPs provide Internet connectivity in a particular territory and sell plans to end users through resellers partners. By joining the Tanaza distributor program, WISPs can do much more thanks to our all-in-one software. The Tanaza distributor program allows WISPs to sell hotspot licenses to MSPs, which then resell complete solutions to end users (restaurants, bars, companies, etc.)

Also, the distributor program allows WISPs to:

1. Generate higher margins

WISPs make higher margins by selling their connectivity services bundled with the wifi networking software, hotspot products and added-value services provided by Tanaza. In detail, the business model of a Tanaza distributor works in this way: the WISP sells its services together with the licenses of the Tanaza branded software to resellers, IT service companies, ISPs, integrators, or directly to end users. In becoming a distributor, the WISP can choose among annual, multiannual or lifetime license types and will enjoy guaranteed volume-based discounts on the Tanaza products – up to 60% off the retail price: in this way, customers won’t directly buy services and products from Tanaza, but will address the distributor first. No entry fee is required to become a Tanaza distributor, although you’re expected to place a minimum established amount of orders per year. On average, once you have become an official distributor, you should be able to sell over 200/300 licenses per year.

Here is a practical example: you buy 100 Tanaza licences for 1 year at €50 each, and distribute them to resellers at €70 each. In this way, you make a margin of €20 on each sold license, meaning you earn €2000 in total.

2. Directly manage business relationships with their customers

One of the perks of the Tanaza software is that, once WISPs have gained new customers, they directly manage the business relationship with them. Indeed, WISPs don’t incur any expense on behalf of Tanaza: Tanaza’s distributors are free to actively market products in the decided territory and to promote, sell and distribute their products. Also, WISPs can manage their customers and see their information through the subaccount management panel provided by Tanaza.

3. Profit from providing bundled Wi-Fi guest access

Furthermore, given that more and more end users want to provide their business with Wi-Fi guest access other than Internet connectivity, WISPs highly benefit from selling Wi-Fi services for customer access, bundled with Internet connectivity. Let’s take a cinema offering guest Wi-Fi provided as a WISP as an example: there are 100 people inside the venue, using guest Wi-Fi, and all of them want to access Wi-Fi to stream the movie’s trailer on the cinema’s website. This means that the cinema owner needs a high amount of available bandwidth to allow all of his visitors to stream online with no issues. In this case, by virtue of the WISP’s bundled services, the cinema can deploy the internet connection still provided by the WISP. Also, with Tanaza, an unlimited number of concurrent users and connected clients can browse online. In this way, both the WISP and the cinema owner are better off: indeed, the WISP will be the first choice for the cinema owner, who will save time and money by choosing the WISP’s affordable and yet well-performing package of services.

4. Sell and do upsells relying on a broad range of services

Tanaza guarantees an outstanding benefit-cost ratio: WISPs can easily sell our affordable and comprehensive set of features, including cloud management and social hotspot management, i.e. the social dashboard, social login, and the customizable captive portal. This variety of features allows WISPs to do upsells at their convenience, depending on what their resellers or end-users may need.

What are you waiting for? Join our distributor program and boost your margins with Tanaza!

Share Wi-Fi passwords with iOS11

by Marketing Team | Jul 11, 2017 | Classic Hotspot, Industry news

Share Wi-Fi passwords with iOS11

Thanks to the latest software update for Apple products, being forced to remember passwords to log into a Wi-Fi network will be a thing of yesterday.

The latest Apple feature resulting from the upcoming iOS software update – iOS11, enables devices already connected to a network to share the network’s Wi-Fi password with other devices that wish to connect.

So, say you walk into a bar where your friends are waiting for and you want to connect to the public Wi-Fi network of the bar, with this new feature, instead of having to ask for the password at the bar counter, you can simply ask one of your friends to share the Wi-Fi password by holding their phone near yours as a means to “transfer the password” directly onto your device and enable a connection.

For this exchange to be successful, both iOS devices must be unlocked, running on the latest operating system released by Apple, iOS11, if its an iPhone or an iPad, and macOS High Sierra, if it’s a computer. Also, at least one of the two devices participating in the exchange must have had to enter the password of the Wi-Fi network manually to connect to it.

How can Tanaza Wi-Fi customers leverage this iOS11 feature?

For SMBs with a public hotspot, creating a Wi-Fi network with a password may not always be the most efficient way to engage with their customers while also collecting data about their Wi-Fi users. If you are interested in leverage your Wi-Fi connection for marketing purposes, we encourage our clients to create Wi-Fi networks with a captive portal. The Tanaza captive portal enables our clients to facilitate Wi-Fi authentication through multiple social networks.

However, if you have no time or inclination in running marketing activities resulting from your Wi-Fi network, and instead would like to give free access to your Wi-Fi, we suggest you use Tanaza’s cloud-management licenses to create a Wi-Fi network with a password.

The advantage of using Tanaza to manage your password-encrypted networks is that you can create multiple networks, both indoor and outdoor with access points from different brands and manage them remotely from a single centralized dashboard.

How to build a reliable Wi-Fi network for offices

by Marketing Team | Jul 10, 2017 | Classic Hotspot, Cloud Management, WiFi Networks

How to build a reliable Wi-Fi network for offices

The Internet literally revolutionised the way companies work, communication is now easier than ever, information is shared in a blink of an eye and cloud applications for business management are proliferating. We have all faced an internet disconnections in the office and been stuck, unable to work.

That is why having a reliable Wi-Fi network in an office is something fundamental.

When deploying a WLAN at your offices, there are two main points that you should consider: the infrastructure of the network and the management of Wi-Fi access for employees.

The network infrastructure

First of all, you need to receive internet from an internet service provider, choosing the offer wisely according to your bandwidth needs. Consider that the number of users and the level of usage will define your needs in Mbps.

Example:

Tanaza’s sales & marketing offices: 20 employees, high usage of the internet, 200 Mbps.
For 50 employees, high usage of internet (video streaming and VoIP calls), consider 600 Mbps – 1 Gbps.

Once you have determined the quantity of bandwidth needed, now comes time to choose the hardware.
There are currently many vendors on the hardware market, and each access point has its own characteristics regarding design and performances.

Regarding the aesthetic of the access point, it is better to opt for ceiling mountable access points that can be installed almost everywhere and don’t occupy space on desks. Eventually, if you want to cover a little garden or any outside area, you will also need an outdoor access point, otherwise, use indoor access points for your offices.
The Ubiquiti AC series (like UAP-AC-Pro, UniFi LR or UniFi Lite) access points or the LigoWave Infinity series can answer to your needs for your offices.
Last but not least, access points like from EnGenius fit perfectly for this kind of deployment, consider to use 3 of them for an open space with 50 employees

Management of the Wi-Fi access for employees

Having a free internet access is necessary for little tasks at work like answering to emails, send files through DropBox or Google Drive, communicate with customers using Skype and much more. But a Wi-Fi network has to be configured to secure and regulate its access.

A cloud management platform for a Wi-Fi network is the best option because you can modify and configure the network from any device, at any time and in any place. You can decide whether to ask a managed service provider to manage your network or to do it on your own.
Tanaza is a multi-vendor software that allows you to manage your Wi-Fi network easily and remotely, from the cloud.

With Tanaza, the network administrator has the possibility to restrict the number of devices per user, control the status of the access points in real-time, and receive automatic emails in case of troubleshooting. Managing a network becomes something really easy and scalable for the network administrator that has access to all kinds of settings right at his fingertips.

When deploying a WLAN within offices, the network administrator can simply configure different SSIDs protected with a password.
For example, the administrator can configure one SSID for the IT staff of the building and another one for the employees. Both require a password to access the Wi-Fi.

The role of the network administrator is also to control the Wi-Fi usage. You don’t want your employees to have access to inappropriate websites while they are at work or to spend too much time on social media sites, like Facebook. For this reason, Tanaza developed a content filtering feature to monitor the network usage and allow you to set up your own rules.

One typical configuration of your Wi-Fi network could be to block the access to all websites like pornography, violence, betting, online games, video streaming etc.
You could also decide to block social media access from 9 am to 1 pm, authorise it during the lunch break and block it again on the afternoon. The platform of this tool has already its own blacklists that are automatically updated.

The content filtering tool is easy to use and flexible to all businesses: it can be used as a real parental control and blocks malware internet pages.

The content filtering is fundamental for your office ‘s Wi-Fi network.

Try content filtering!

Related articles:

3 RF basics you should know to better design your WLAN

Why Tanaza does not make you pay per concurrent users or splash page views

https://www.classichotspot.com/blog/top-3-liabilities-wi-fi-hotspot-providers-offering-free-wi-fi/

3 RF basics you should know to better design your WLAN

by Marketing Team | Jul 10, 2017 | Classic Hotspot, Networking, WiFi Networks

3 RF basics you should know to better design your WLAN

If you want to design an effective WLAN deployment, you first need to understand 3 very useful radio frequency concepts.

In order to design and implement a successful Wi-Fi network, you need to be familiar with the following 3 RF fundamentals.

1. WIRELESS CHANNELS

The first thing to know is that all Wi-Fi devices communicate through a channel. Each channel is characterised by a number, which corresponds to a precise radio frequency. The 2 main frequency bands used among WLAN access points are 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz. Worldwide there are 14 channels using the 2.4 GHz band, whose availability varies from country to country (for instance, channel 14 is only available in Japan). It is good to know that the only 3 channels where signals don’t overlap are the number 1, 6 and 11. Nevertheless, especially in highly congested spaces such as working environments, all channels are used. As a result, signals invade other channels’ bandwidth and end up creating interference. A solution to this is to opt for channels operating on the 5 GHz band. In fact, 5 GHz is less congested, as the majority of Wi-Fi devices such as computers, Bluetooth devices, cellular and cordless phones operate on the 2.4 GHz band. Furthermore, 5 GHz provides a higher number of frequency channels, of which 23 do not overlap: all access point operating on the 5Ghz band usually support channels 36, 40, 44, 48, 54, 56, 60 and 64. Lastly, it is useful to point out that, in the 2.4 GHz band, active Wi-Fi signals are 20-22 MHz wide, whereas in the 5 GHz band signals can be 20, 40, 80, up to 160 MHz wide. In general, 20 Mhz channel width is recommended for high-dense enterprise deployments, while 40 MHz works well in areas with medium-low crowded Wi-Fi networks.

Read this article to know how to pick the right channel for your Wi-Fi deployment.

2. RF PROPAGATION

Radio frequency propagates through space with different behaviours: reflection, absorption, refraction, diffraction and scattering. Being aware of how RF moves around a particular space is relevant to understand why, when positioning an access point in a location, radio frequency waves can or not reach certain places within a room and neighbor areas.

Under reflection, RF signals bounce to another direction when they hit reflecting materials that are larger than the wave, i.e. metals; reflection highly occurs in indoor WLAN deployments.
Absorption occurs when RF signals are converted to heat and absorbed by certain materials, such as concrete or water.
In the case of refraction, RF signals change direction when they pass through a material with a different density; refraction mainly occurs in outdoor WLAN deployments, which are affected by changes in atmospheric conditions and air temperatures.
With diffraction, RF waves change direction when they move around an object of a certain size, shape or material.
Scattering can be intended as “many reflections of the RF wave”, and occurs when the wavelength of the RF signal is larger that the one of the medium/material/object the signal is passing through.

Knowing how radio frequencies react depending on the material they come into contact with, helps you avoid possible interferences caused by physical obstacles, i.e. water, bricks, trees, microwaves, etc. In this way, you will know better where to design your WLAN and where to place your access points.

Read this article to learn how to position your Wi-Fi router properly.

3. RF MEASUREMENTS

In order to understand how strong the RF signal of your WLAN is, you need to know how to measure it. We measure RF power levels through milliwatts (mW) and decibel-milliwatt (dBm): a mW is an absolute unit corresponding to 1/1000th of a Watt, and a dBm is a decibel relative to a milliwatt. In general, it is more convenient to use dBm than mW: as we use very low output power levels, generally comprised between 0 and 1 mW, it is easier to say that your access point transmits X dBm rather than saying it transmits 0.0000X mW. The table below shows the relation between mW and dBm.

1 mW = 0 dBm

10 mW = 10 dBm

100 mW = 20 dBm

1 W = 1000 mW = 30 dBm

Keeping in mind this table, you can now measure RF power levels with the rule of 10s and 3s, according to which:

For every gain of 3 dB, the power in mW is doubled
For every loss of 3 dB, the power in mW is halved
For every gain of 10 dB, the power in mW is multiplied by 10
For every loss of 10 dB, the power in mW is divided by 10

In this article, you can learn how the rule of 10s and 3s works together with an example of its application.

HOW-TO: Choose channel, TX Power and configure radio settings

New outdoor access points supported by Tanaza

by Marketing Team | Jul 6, 2017 | Classic Hotspot, Wireless Hardware

New outdoor access points supported by Tanaza

Tanaza supports two new access points from Ubiquiti that fit perfectly for outdoor deployments:

These access points are weather resistant which makes them ideal for deployments in public spaces like parks, festivals, beaches and so on.

Their design is smart and minimalistic, both access points work on the 5 GHz frequency which means that the risk of interference is low.

About their prices, the two access points are available at an affordable price.

The device Ubiquiti Rocket M5 Titanium XW can have an external antenna installed in order to multiply its power and to guarantee a good coverage. If you want more information about how to maximize the access point power with an antenna, read this article.

These two Ubiquiti access points allow users to browse the internet, watch videos online and make VoIP calls even with a lot of concurrent users.

To see the full list of supported access points, click here.

7 best outdoor access points supported by Tanaza

by Marketing Team | Jul 4, 2017 | Classic Hotspot, Wireless Hardware

7 best outdoor access points supported by Tanaza

In a previous article, we discussed the 10 access points most used by Tanaza’s users. Today, we provide the list of the 7 best outdoor access points supported by Tanaza.

One of the main perks of Tanaza is its vendor-agnostic approach: you can choose the access points you prefer for your Wi-Fi deployments, as Tanaza supports a wide range of access point models from different vendors. Among them, let’s focus on the best access points for outdoor deployments, i.e. parks, public streets, main squares, etc.